Saxon Blue Dye

I was rummaging through my collection of dyes in the garage and found some Saxon Blue in liquid form, which I've had for a few years. I went to the Botanical Colors website for some helpful tips. 

This is a dye which the Germans developed from indigo in the 1700's. Someone acidified it...as we know acid is a common feature of synthetic dyes.  (The company that is now BASF later developed a synthetic indigo, so they may have known that they were onto something with the acid thing...)

It is not a vat dye like indigo, so I pretreated my handspun yarn samples with a simmer in an aluminum acetate pot (with a tsp of AA) for an hour. I'm no longer using kitchen alum for mordanting but I don't know whether this makes a difference...another experiment to do...

Now, I don't like to measure so I didn't! But I have discovered using pH strips that my tap water is pH neutral.

I emptied the dye, about an ounce of liquid into warm water and dropped in my six small skeins

It simmered for an hour, but the yarns were still pale blue. BC suggested adding vinegar so into the pot went 1/2 c of distilled vinegar. In stand success! Here are the dried samples, some sheep's wool, some mohair. I've noticed in my dyeing practice that sheep's wool tends to take up more color.

Now, there was still some dye in the pot, so I decided to add two more small skeins and some bundles of osage orange shavings.  

 After an hour, the pot again required 1/2 cup of distilled vinegar.  Voilà again...a lovely grassy green!  The fabric holding the osage orange was also mordanted so I have some dyed fabric samples to give away too!